I’m thrilled to announce that Comfort Station has been awarded a $50,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The foundation's International Connections Fund will allow us to carry out a two-way exchange between artistic communities in Chicago and Salvador, Brazil in 2019 and 2020, in a project called Perto de Lá <> Close To There. We'll be partnering with Projeto Ativa and Harmonipan to bring together a multi-disciplinary group of artists to develop collaborative work, compare models of arts-organizing, and create discourse around Latinx and Black identity in our respective cities.
The project will be organized and curated by myself, Lanussi Pasquali of Projeto Ativa and Juci Reis of Harmonipan. This is an extension of the edition of Perto de Lá that I founded and produced in 2015 in collaboration with Lanussi Pasquali and João Pereira.